Just the other day, I was reading an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about Timberwolves forward Kevin Love's recent three-point shooting binge. As a rookie last year, Love made just 2 of his 19 three point attempts. This year, while playing just seven games after recently returning from a broken hand suffered just before the start of the season, Love has made 7 of his 11 three-point shots. In just seven games! The writer (Strib Wolves beat writer Jerry Zgoda) asked if there was a reason for the recent barrage of long range shots. Shockingly, Love said that early in the season last year, a "forgotten" coach had instructed him to stay under the basket and shoot only inside of 10 feet. When pressed further, Love stated that he couldn't remember that long ago as to remember the coach's name. When asked if it was former Wolves coach Randy Wittman, Love replied with "Yeah, no comment." Now, it is not unusual for coaches to give these kinds of instructions to players. At the end of the day, it's the coach's reputation on the line pending the outcome of the game. But in this case, if this story is indeed true, it would seem to indicate yet another instance in a disturbing pattern of coaches arbitrarily imposing their will over their players. Anyone who saw Kevin Love play for one year at UCLA knows that he is a player who is more than capable of hitting outside shots. In fact, when Love was traded for shortly after the 2008 NBA Draft, then Wolves GM Kevin McHale specifically cited Love's outside game and ability to play the high post as what attracted the organization to him, considering the team already had a supreme low post talent in Jefferson. Apparently, however, Coach Wittman did not share the same regard for Love's talents.
This all seemed strange to me; drafting a player with the intent of pairing him with a low post scorer, and then subsequently instructing him not to shoot the ball. Very odd. The only thing that makes this declaration by Wittman even remotely defensible is that offensive rebounding is a huge element of Kevin Love's game, and it is hard to get offensive rebounds when you're shooting 20 footers all the time. Love was 2nd in offensive rebounds per game last season with 3.4 in just over 25 minutes per game. The only player ahead of him in this category, Dwight Howard, played almost 36 minutes per game. Regardless, Love's penchant for offensive rebounding should not have been a reason for him to be completely barred from taking outside shots.
Wittman's mandate of Love seems eerily similar to an issue that came up a number of years back, when the Detroit Pistons had the second overall pick in the 2003 Draft and chose Darko "The Beast" Milicic over Carmelo Anthony. Their main argument at the time was that coach Larry Brown wasn't going to play a rookie the kind of minutes Anthony would have deserved, so they were better off taking a project type player like Milicic for the betterment of the team. We later learned this to be at least partially true when Brown took the opportunity to bury Carmelo on Team USA's bench during the 2004 Olympics, ruining his confidence for the next 10 months in the process. (I just realized that Mandate of Love would make an awesome title for a VH1 reality show. Here's the premise: A female Supreme Court Justice, lets say Justice Sotomayor, looking for a hot young fling, would choose between 20 recently paroled men in an attempt to find real lust. There would be tattoos, knife fights, keggars, and a strong possibility that all of Justice Sotomayor's belongings would be pawned off by the end of the series. This couldn't miss.) The decision to take Darko instead of Carmelo had nothing to do with basketball at the end of the day. It was a move to placate an insecure coach who would rather do things his way than do them the right way.
This has become too frequent an issue in professional sports. Bill Belichick is certainly a guilty party. In the Patriots' November 15th game against the Colts, Belichick infamously sent his offense back on the field to go for it on 4th down from their own 28 with just over 2 minutes left in the game while leading by 6. Why would a coach do this? Certainly the conventional, time tested decision here is to punt the football away and let your defense try to stop the Colts from going 80 for a game winning TD. Even though the Pats had been having trouble slowing the Colts offense in that game, it's still pretty unlikely that Peyton and his boys would have been able to roll down the field and score the case TD. I truly believe Belichick made the decision to go for it in such a strange situation so he would be the reason they won the game. If they get that first down, then Belichick's genius would have become even more undeniable that it already was. We're talking about an NFL coach who won 3 Super Bowls in 4 years, not including 2007, when the Patriots only became the first NFL team in 35 years to go undefeated throughout the regular season and the first team to do it since the schedule expanded to 16 games. What more did this guy have to prove to anyone? How insecure of a guy must Belichick be to still have to display his genius in such ways? It's really a perplexing issue.
Two great examples of this in baseball are Tony LaRussa and Joe Girardi; two managers who haven't met a pitching change or defensive replacement that they haven't liked . LaRussa is tougher to criticize for his actions as his history lacks a defining "backfire moment" along the lines of Girardi and Belichick. My critique of LaRussa will therefore revolve around the way he changed baseball for the worse over the past 30 years. LaRussa is more or less singularly responsible for baseball games that take 3 and a half hours and useless middle relief pitchers making $5 million a year. Before he took over the White Sox in 1979, baseball consisted mainly of two types of pitchers: Starters and closers. Starters would take the ball as far as they could with the hope that they could take it the whole way. If they were only able to get through 7 or 8 innings, then the closer would come in and take it the rest of the way. Guys like Rollie Fingers and Goose Gossage had terrific careers out of this closer role in the 70's and early 80's. LaRussa turned the game on its ear with his almost schizophrenic way of changing pitchers. He created the idea of the lefty/lefty and righty/righty match-ups that seem to backfire as often as they are successful. He invented the "8 pitchers in one game and we win by 4 runs" strategy that would have been unheard of if not for him. Now, if LaRussa had never existed, would somebody else have come up with this strategy? Probably, but LaRussa is an easy guy to dislike, with his unchanging hair color and tendency to get behind the wheel after a few too many. This is really just one more thing. Girardi's pitcher-happy style almost cost his team a World Series title and got him fired in the process. His quick trigger in the ALCS potentially cost his team a clinching game and extended the series, and as we all know, any team with a lock-down guy like Brian Fuentes closing games for it is not a team you want to play in tight spots (well...maybe not).
The overarching theme here is that these "managerial" decisions are intended to cover the manager/coach regardless of the outcome. If the decision is successful, then the team won thanks to the foresight and instincts of their fearless leader. This, of course, is the desired outcome, because it leads to big money extensions and awards that look great above the fireplace. If the tactics fail, then the manager/coach can point to the numbers and say, "Hey, I did my job. I put my guys/girls in the best possible situation, and they failed to come through. I wish I could just shoot them all and do this all myself, seeing as I'm so great." Well, no one has probably ever said the last part, but almost every professional coach in the age of statistics has said the first part. The problem with the above theory is that it doesn't work. How many coaches do we see get fired each year in every sport? At the beginning of the 2007 season, every coaching post in the NBA's Eastern Conference had changed hands in the previous 16 months. Clearly whatever these coaches are trying to do in order to insulate themselves from the results their team produces isn't working.
The bottom line that coaches don't seem to understand is that they are always going to be held responsible for their team's failings whether or not they play things by the numbers. When was the last time after a losing season that an owner looked at his franchise and said "You know what? We've got terrible players, but that coach is a genius! Dump all the high priced talent and get me new players. We're building around Byron Scott's game day coaching!" George W. Bush will be asked to join MENSA before that scenario ever plays out. The only recourse coaches have in today's "what have you done for me lately" world is to, as Herm Edwards put it, PLAY TO WIN THE GAME!!! A novel idea, I know. Playing to win leaves you open to criticism if you lose and makes everything your fault, but as I've already detailed, it's always the coaches fault regardless of whether or not it's actually his fault.
Coaches will never find security in their jobs until they start trusting their players to do what they do best and stop handcuffing them with inane, self-serving decision making. We're talking about teams full of professional athletes. 99% of these guys care more about their job than anything else in their lives. They want to win. They want to be successful. Most of the time, the best move a professional coach can make is to take a seat, cross his legs and hope that the work put in between games is enough to carry the team during the game. The fans aren't there to see their team's coach jump up and down on the sideline while screaming instructions at guys who have been playing the game their entire lives. We fans go to games to watch the players play and to cheer our team on to victory. Coaches really just get in the way. Basically, unless the coach is going to throw a hissy fit and get thrown out of the game, no one really cares what they do. No one is going to drive home and talk with their buddies about the great substitution Kurt Rambis made with 8:39 left to play in the third quarter. Gomes in for Wilkins? What a freaking genius!
My theory as to what coaches should do is going to cost some of them genius points. If Belichick does the conventional thing and punts against the Colts, odds are that the Patriots would have won the game and the Colts would not be undefeated right now, but Belichick would have been just another coach with a supremely talented team who beat another coach with a supremely talented team. There's nothing special there. But if coaches would more often than not play to the conventions and stop over-thinking (certain tactics are convention for a reason...they work!), the wins that would result from letting their team play their game would be more than enough to get them the big money extensions that we all long for. Let the good looking trophies sit on the fireplace of the unemployed coaches. I'd take the wins.
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